I've taken my first baby steps to creating ActionStream plugins. These are for newsvine and blogcritics. I've also got a "tip" (for want of a better word) for the smugmug plugin. I've still not figured out how to separate articles from seeds on newsvine, but that's because I don't have any seeds out there.
Incidentally, the default AS has both newsvine and smugmug. But the default installation says there are no streams available for newsvine. So I took those sections out of the default install and wrote them out into a new plugin for newsvine. As far as smugmug is concerned, I suspect the url syntax in the default install is outdated, so I took that out as well and wrote it up separately. They can easily be put back into the default ActionStreams install.
Question: where and how do I post the plugins? I'd like someone familiar with AS to please check my code (it's probably got the most horrendous errors, so apologies in addvance) before they go out, though they seem to work well on my installation.
Reported on Movable Type 4.2
Opps, sorry! This should have gone into the Action Streams forum!
my bad. it's there. dazed and confused. sorry
For Blogcritics? That rocks! I LOVE Blogcritics! Especially the Gaming section. I kid, I kid. What will be in the Action Stream? Have you talked to Phillip about it?
I am very interested. Will you just be taking the author feed such as http://blogcritics.org/archives/authors/GautamPatel.xml or http://blogcritics.org/archives/authors/KenEdwards.xml. I do not know if we have an author comment feed, but that would be nice for an Action Stream, thats for sure.
@Ken,
Yes, it's for the author feed -- I found it at Blogcritics. I could send you the files, because I can't seem to submit the plugin. I tried over at the plugins page, after logging in, and it said "permission denied". ???
No idea. I would love to try it out! ken@blogcritics.org, of course ;) Thanks!
@Ken -- did you get the plugin I sent by email as a tarball yesterday? Any feedback on that?
@Gautam, I am afraid not :( I was hoping to check it out figured you might have sent it. Lets try ken@meancode.com? I just checked my spam on my BC email and got nothing from you. Sorry.
Ken, I did send it to the meancode address! Very odd. Anyway, here's a [download link][1].
[1] http://www.gautampatel.com/files/ActionStream-Blogcritics.tar.gz
And this is what I wrote in my email to you:
Upload the files to the mt installation root (/your/server/path/mt). If you upload the tarball to the mt installation root and unpack/extract it there it will preserve the required directory structure and hierarchy, and set the permissions correctly.
If FTP'ing file by file, the structure is:
/mt/plugins/ASBlogcritics/config.yaml <-- set permissions to 755 /mt/mt-static/plugins/AsBlogcritics/images/bc.png /mt/mt-static/plugins/AsBlogcritics/images/bc.png <-- not needed, just there
Add your ActionStreams profile ... enter your username (Ken_Edwards), and you should be good to go.
It adds the date of your entry at BC, and the category too.
Incidentally, it returns the full form of the date, but MT sees this as a string, not a date. To show only the date (who needs the time and the nanoseconds?), you modify the template code like so:
This will return the date Thu, 09 Sep 2008
Also note that on the first scan, for some unfathomable reason, it doesn't show the stream. If you go into the ActionStreams section under Profiles, you will see all the BC entries with a yellow road-warning sign by them. Select all of these and set them to show. After this, all future scans go through correctly.
You can also set the username to your favorite author on BC, and it will pull his feed. I'm not sure that's a very bright idea (for copyright reasons). Should I add an "author" field too? Remember, this is true of most of the other AS plugins that go only by author name and not by some secret code. Flickr, Goodreads, etc. need a confidential code. Smugmug, newsvine, digg do not, so you can put in just about any valid authorname and it will work.
Do let me know how things go. If it works, I'll write up a readme.text or help file for it.
Phillip who? Phillip Winn?
@@@%$%% Markdown!
Ken, I did send it to the meancode address! Very odd. Anyway, here's a download link.
And this is what I wrote in my email to you:
Upload the files to the mt installation root (/your/server/path/mt). If you upload the tarball to the mt installation root and unpack/extract it there it will preserve the required directory structure and hierarchy, and set the permissions correctly.
If FTP'ing file by file, the structure is:
/mt/plugins/ASBlogcritics/config.yaml <-- set permissions to 755 /mt/mt-static/plugins/AsBlogcritics/images/bc.png /mt/mt-static/plugins/AsBlogcritics/images/bc.png <-- not needed, just there
Add your ActionStreams profile ... enter your username (Ken_Edwards), and you should be good to go.
It adds the date of your entry at BC, and the category too.
Incidentally, it returns the full form of the date, but MT sees this as a string, not a date. To show only the date (who needs the time and the nanoseconds?), you modify the template code like so:
This will return the date Thu, 09 Sep 2008
Also note that on the first scan, for some unfathomable reason, it doesn't show the stream. If you go into the ActionStreams section under Profiles, you will see all the BC entries with a yellow road-warning sign by them. Select all of these and set them to show. After this, all future scans go through correctly.
You can also set the username to your favorite author on BC, and it will pull his feed. I'm not sure that's a very bright idea (for copyright reasons). Should I add an "author" field too? Remember, this is true of most of the other AS plugins that go only by author name and not by some secret code. Flickr, Goodreads, etc. need a confidential code. Smugmug, newsvine, digg do not, so you can put in just about any valid authorname and it will work.
Do let me know how things go. If it works, I'll write up a readme.text or help file for it.
Have you talked to Phillip about it?
Phillip who? Phillip Winn?
Yes Phillip Winn. I talked to him about the HTML in the titles and he said that would be a rather large change, meaning it is not gonna happen.
Many thanks with your help getting the BC Action Script working, anyone can see it here:
http://blogs.bgviews.com/dev/actions/
I guess I will start a new thread asking about how to strip the tags of the Title only, and do it using the loop on the main AS Archive page.
Ken